“You don’t believe that for one second,” I said.
“No,” Medusa said. “My people haven’t returned, and that was an hour ago. They are not usually ones to dawdle.”
“Any chance any of them could have turned?” I asked as the doors opened.
Medusa took the question as it was meant, without offense. “No. I trust them all. And yes, I know Apep worked here, but I never once trusted that little shit, so it’s not the same.”
We walked down a short flight of stairs to a parking garage with dozens of cars inside. A tall, muscular woman stood behind a desk inside a small hut.
“Nate needs something fast,” Medusa said.
The woman grabbed a set of keys from under the counter and threw them to me. “Don’t scratch it,” she said, her booming voice echoing around the garage.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” I said, looking down at the set of keys in my hand, which said Aston Martin. At any other point in my life, I would have smiled, but the concern for Daniel and Jess overrode the emotion, even when I found the gunmetal-gray Vanquish coupe and got inside.
Medusa passed me the rucksack. “Heckler and Koch,” she said. “MP5 and a HK45. Suppressors for both should you need them. Both have five magazines, hollow-point silver bullets, as standard. If you need to put anyone down, do so. Once you figure out where they are, you call me, Isis, or Chris. I assume you don’t want to wait around for me to have another team ready?”
“Not even a little bit,” I said.
“In that case, I trust you not to get involved in anything before notifying us of a threat. Please don’t get yourself killed. They were driving a black BMW model X7 SUV.”
I placed the bag in the footwell of the passenger seat. “I’ll try.”
“Don’t break the speed limit either. If you get pulled over in this with those guns, you’re going to jail.”
“Yeah, I figured that bit out, thanks,” I said with a smile. “I’ll contact you and let you know what’s happening.”
I ignited the V12 engine and drove up through the garage until I came to the exit, which was barred by a large metal gate. As I stopped the car by the switch to open the gate and wound down my window, my passenger door opened and Brooke climbed in.
“Ummm, what are you doing?” I asked.
“Coming with you,” she said. “Don’t argue; we don’t have time.”
She opened the bag, removed the pistol for herself, and left the MP5 inside. “I haven’t had much practice with those,” she said by way of explanation. “I’m more comfortable with a pistol or shotgun.”
I sat wordlessly as the gate rose up, spending the time putting the address of the shop into the satnav inside the car, before I drove out of the garage at a relatively sedate pace. The ten-minute drive took me less than five, which made me feel like it was slightly pointless to take a car capable of the speeds the Aston Martin was. I pulled up outside the pharmacy and switched off the engine.
Two black BMW X7 SUVs sat in the car park. The pharmacy was bigger than I’d expected, but there were no other cars there, which I had to admit was a bit weird. I got out of the car and stared at the sliding front door of the pharmacy.
“There’s a note on it,” I said to Brooke.
“I’ll check the cars; you go read.”
I left the MP5 in the car, mostly because if someone decided to come into the car park and saw me standing there with it in my hands, I might soon after be hearing sirens nearby, and I could do without that.
The lights inside the pharmacy were off, which was kind of strange considering it was nearly nine a.m. The note on the door said that it was closed today due to an outbreak of a dangerous pollutant. It gave no more information than that and had been written by hand in someone’s neatest capital-letter handwriting.
Brooke said as she stood beside me, “Cars are clean, both locked, no one inside either. You think they came here, saw the note, and went further but got lost or something?”
I shook my head. “Nope. I think they came here, and shit went south fast.” I looked back over to the cars. “It’s seventy feet from the furthest car to these doors. I very much doubt the guards would have gone inside with Daniel and Jess, not to begin with. So they sat there and waited, and something happened that made them get out of the car.”
“A noise?”
I nodded and peered through the window again. “If there’s a dangerous outbreak in there, then there should either be a manager out here waiting for a cleanup crew or an employee out here waiting for their manager.” I walked back to the car, retrieved my MP5, and aimed at the supermarket door.
“Whoa,” Brooke said. “The second you pull that trigger, anyone around here is going to know what’s happening. Even with that suppressor.”
“Trust me,” I said, pointing to the glowing purple runes on the suppressor. “Runes can take away noise. And about a million other things, but in this instance, it’s more the noise thing.”
“Well, even with that, you’re still not going to smash through the glass here with a bullet,” Brooke said. “It’s tough glass; it’s designed to absorb impacts. It’ll splinter the glass but not shatter it. Besides, what if the people who caused trouble here left the door unlocked?”
I lowered the gun, and Brooke pushed the door. It slid open.
“Let’s pretend that didn’t happen,” I said, stepping into the dark pharmacy with the MP5 at the ready.
“You smell anything?” Brooke asked.
“Blood,” I said, pointing to the smear on the ground next to the counter. I walked around and found the three bodies of the guards, all of whom had been shot twice in the head and chest and dumped behind the counter.
“Shit,” Brooke whispered.
“Where are the staff?” I asked as we stepped around the bodies and pushed open a door to a short corridor beyond. There were three doors in the corridor, two opposite us and one at the far end. “No cars out front, no staff out there.” I pushed open the door closest to us.
“My God,” Brooke whispered as we both stood looking at the bodies inside what had once been some kind of staff room. They looked like they’d been torn apart. Blood splattered the entire room, and pieces of what appeared to be flesh had been torn and ripped off the victims. Of the four bodies, all of them were covered in blood, three of them were missing their throats, and all of them had gore adorning their fingers. One had two holes in their head, presumably because they hadn’t died as quickly as their executioners wanted, or they’d been the last survivor. I was going to make sure to kill everyone responsible for this atrocity.
“They did this to themselves,” I whispered. “Holy fuck.”
“What?” Brooke asked.
I looked around the room at the runes that had been drawn all over. The same runes that adorned my suppressor. “They ensured no one would hear them,” I said. “And do you smell that? There’s a weird scent in the air. Something happened in here that drove these people to tear each other apart.”
“Why leave the front door unlocked if they go to this trouble?” Brooke asked.
I didn’t have a good answer to that question that made me feel better.